The Guilty Party

by Mel McGrath

  ‘If we are what we’ve found, I’m a shark and you’re some spineless things and a pile of crap.’

  ‘It might be your birthday but you’re still a dick.’

  ‘You love dicks . . .’ Bo says. ‘Which reminds me, I’m peckerish. Lunch, anyone?’

  We order crab sandwiches and beer at a café on the beach one along. Anna pops outside to call home and speak to Ralphie and his babysitter while the rest of us, who have no one at home to call, thumb our phones or gaze out as if purposively over Chesil Beach.

  ‘Storm forecast tonight so there should be some good fossiling tomorrow,’ Bo says.

  Dex’s phone bleeps. ‘Gav.’ He gets up and goes outside to return the call and I’m reminded uncomfortably of this morning’s conversation and of Marika. Our unforgivable turning away.

  At the table opposite me Bo continues to gaze at his phone. He’s pushed up the sleeves of his jumper, a starfish on one forearm, a homepage logo on the wrist of the other. The homepage is new.

  ‘Checking your matches?’

  ‘Nah, I got one lined up, remember? Just work stuff.’

  ‘Mind if I interrupt?’

  He looks up, his curiosity roused by the hint of seriousness in my tone. As a rule Bo and I don’t do earnest or sincere. Neither of us is built for heartfelt one-to-ones. Our friendship is basically fifteen years of ho ho ha ha bantz.

  ‘That woman’s been on my mind, the one we saw in the churchyard.’

  Bo’s eyes flick back to his phone before settling back on me. He wants to return to the virtual world, the world where there are no real events and no real consequences.

  ‘Casspot, please. We agreed we weren’t even going to talk about that.’ He leans towards me until I can see every raised red dot of the shaving rash on his neck. ‘Whatever was going on in that alley, I’m, like, cool just to let it go.’ He pulls back, resumes a relaxed position, eyes on his phone. Outside, Anna is sitting on the wall talking behind a cupped hand. Dex is standing a way off, one hand in his pocket, pacing.

  The food arrives and with it, Anna and Dex. We eat and chat inconsequentially about London mostly and the impossibility of finding the time to get together except around one another’s birthdays and how it hasn’t always been like that. Remember that last summer in Oxford, just before Bo made the move to London and broke the spell? We’d all graduated by then, still loosely two couples, drifting happily in and out of jobs we knew were dead ends but so much time bloomed ahead of us it didn’t matter. Anna was waitressing at Brown’s while writing songs and spending all her free nights in the pub music scene. Bo was working in a bike shop and developing his first big software project. Dex had finished the internship that his dad had set up for him in the law firm and come back to Oxford to work in the café at the Ashmolean Museum, and I was working on my MA and trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life. We were lost, but that felt good, a way of escaping the well-worn paths we saw others slipping into. Instead we cultivated rebel attitude with the freedom of the young not to have to define what we were rebelling against. The days seemed short and the nights endless. After work, we’d take beer and wrapped chips out to Port Meadow or cycle up to the Trout at Wolvercote and sit drinking on the riverbank with our feet afloat in the cool water. It was the run up to the financial crash, the moment before the Fall, but, we were ignorant of all of that and so we were in Paradise.

  Anna and I order coffee. Before it arrives I go outside for a smoke, an old and very bad habit I’ve returned to, on and off, since that night in Wapping. I sit on the wall and idly scroll through matches on my dating app, but every one is a left swipe, so I put my phone away and endeavour to return to the present, to this lovely weekend in Dorset with my friends, but it’s hopeless. My brain remains stuck in a groove at the bottom of which is Marika and the churchyard and thoughts of drowning. Why can’t I just leave it like the others seem to have done? Why don’t they seem to care?

  It’s suddenly got much colder out here. I stand and turn to go back inside and as I do, my eye lands on a small, dazzling object on the beach. When I move to avoid it, the sparkle appears to move too, so, heading towards the object, my phone still in my hand and expecting a wrapper or a pull-ring, I find instead a small ammonite, so shiny and so perfect in its definition that it looks brand new.

  Returning to the wall where I was sitting smoking only a moment ago, I lay the fossil on my palm.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ says a woman’s voice. Belonging to a uniformed copper, taller than me and with dazzling conkercoloured hair. ‘It’s not common to find them in settled weather, and at the end of the season too.’

  ‘Is it real?’ It seems perfect, so untroubled by time I wonder if I haven’t picked up an imitation of a fossil, a discarded piece of jewellery perhaps, or a pint-sized paperweight.

  ‘Iron pyrite. Fool’s gold, they call it. They’re more common further west.’

  We both stare at the object in my hand, in awe that such a small thing, a simple, mute, virtually brainless creature, alive in less than a blink in evolutionary time, should be transformed into something so perfect and so permanent. ‘I’m Julie, by the way.’ She points to her police badge. ‘PC Blythe, Port Police.’

  ‘You grew up here?’

  She smiles. ‘Is it that obvious?’ We move on to a more general conversation about the island. I feign attention, but I am shocked to find myself longing to confide in Julie about the woman, drawn to her calm, authoritative presence as surely as if I were sailing into port after months at sea.

  ‘Can’t be much crime around here.’

  ‘We get our share of the usual drugs, antisocial stuff, domestics, an occasional escape from one of the prisons. Every now and then some kid goes missing, but they always turn up.’

  Shouldn’t I be afraid of Julie finding out what we did, or what we didn’t do that night in the churchyard at Wapping? Then why are the words already gathering themselves like a lifeboat about to put out to save a drowning soul?

  Julie nods at the ammonite glittering on the palm of my left hand. ‘I always think they’re like messengers, you know, from history, or from another time. The things they’d tell us if only we understood the message. It’s an old custom around here to put one of those under your pillow at night. People say it makes you dream about your future.’

  ‘Funny, someone else told me that.’

  We’re looking directly into one another’s eyes now. Can she see the dark clouds rushing across my face? My mouth opens and at that moment Bo bursts through the door. ‘Your coffee’s getting cold, Casspot.’

  ‘Okey doke, well, fine words butter no parsnips, as my old dad used to say. I’ve got criminals to catch.’ Julie holds out a hand. The fingers, which are more elegant than mine, brush against my fingertips and the moment for truth vanishes.

  Bo says, ‘What you got?’

  ‘An ammonite, in fool’s gold. And no, you can’t have it for your birthday because I’m keeping it.’

  He laughs, holding the door open in that way men do when they are laying claim to their size relative to yours, consciously or otherwise, with his hand clasped against the door above head height, giving me no option but to duck back inside the café. As we approach the table Anna finishes a mouthful of food and wipes her lips with a napkin.

  ‘What were you doing out there all this time?’

  I open my palm and let the ammonite fall onto the table. Dex picks it up and begins to turn it over in his hands.

  ‘Is that what you were talking to that policewoman about?’ Anna asks. There’s something dark and raw in her tone, like a winter wind.

  ‘Among other things.’ I recount what Julie said about the old fort built by prisoners and the holiday park where you can get lovely Dorset cheeses, and the collection of old photographs and memorabilia in the prison museum up on the top of the hill.

  ‘And she mentioned the stables, the ones Will said something about.’

  Anna’s eyebrows rise and a crispness reap
pears on her face. ‘Oh, I’d love to go for a ride on the beach, wouldn’t you, darling? Maybe we could do that when the men go fishing.’

  A thought arrives. ‘Oh, yes, and she says there’s this old Portland custom where men who behave badly towards women can be stoned off the island.’

  Dex eyes Bo. ‘Mate, that’s us on notice.’

  We chuckle because we expect that of each other but, as I look around at the Group, I wonder which of us is laughing inside.

  15

  Anna

  12.30 a.m., Sunday 14 August, Wapping

  As she said it she felt bad using Ralphie as an excuse, but the feeling has long since passed and now, sitting in the Uber as it makes its way east from St Katharine Dock back to Wapping, it amuses her to think about what the others would say if they knew the truth. Not only about the affair, but about what came before it.

  The desperation, after the accident, to run as hard as she could, and at any cost, towards life. The surprise pregnancy while she was still convalescing (her periods had stopped long before, hence the surprise), then the business of keeping Ralphie’s paternity a secret, even after Cassie had already guessed it. Watching herself balloon while the people who were supposed to love her flat out lied about how gorgeous she looked and how blooming. And then her marriage to Isaac, which everyone but Isaac himself understood as a settling, and since then, the daily struggle to avoid slipping up and letting on.

  She crosses her legs, admiring the stretch of the skin to shininess over the knees, recalling the time it took just to be able to look at Ralphie without resenting the fact that it was he who had caused her to grow fat. The shame of her hostility towards her baby son like carrying something necrotic and gangrenous inside you. Thank God she was able to lose her baby weight, and then quite a bit more after Bo visited her a month or so after the birth and chucked her under what he described as her ‘sweet little food chin’. She was so hurt she nearly broke. Thank God she didn’t. He had always said even when they were together that he couldn’t guarantee not to run if ever she got pregnant. Even now, nearly a year on, she reimagines the scene and what could have happened if she’d told Bo that he was in part responsible for the chin and, indeed, the baby. That would have been the last she’d have seen of him, most likely – the most important person in her life. Ralphie not excepted.

  She catches herself in the rear-view mirror. People always say a baby looks like its father, at least in the first few months. In Ralphie’s case they were not wrong. Anna can’t see anything of herself in him. To her he’s all Luke ‘Bo’ Bowen. Once Ralphie gets a bit older it will probably become obvious. Anna wonders if Isaac will notice. Her sense is that if he ever finds out he’ll decide not to say anything and to carry on as before. In return, Anna will continue to pretend to love and be faithful to him. A devil’s bargain, the kind couples make all the time. When the penny does eventually drop, Anna feels well able to handle it. If Bo finds out, on the other hand, say if Cassie ever blurts it, Anna would run the risk of losing him. It makes her sick just to think about that.

  She shifts on the upholstered seat, in an attempt to chase the thought away, and in doing so releases a tang of vomit which rises to meet the stench of cheap vanilla air freshener. Great, so she’s sitting in someone’s lightly disguised Saturday night barf which has been poorly wiped. Though in a way it’s a relief because both vom and air freshener serve to mask the unmistakable odour of sex. She feels the delicate tissue of flesh between her legs strain just a little. It makes her sad, the way it ended with Ollie, but also angry. Anna is used to being the dumper not the dumpee. Though there was Bo. The first and by a long way the worst. Has she brought this on herself, the unsettling sense of being trapped in the wrong life? Doesn’t everyone feel that at some point in their lives? Having Ralphie didn’t help, but she can hardly blame it on the baby. The pretence started a long time before.

  It’s not easy being beautiful. The manufactured air of mystery expected of women who look like Anna, the constant toggling between simpering sex kitten and ice queen which seems to be required. This is the only way in which she envies Cassie. There’s no pressure on Cassie to be anything at all. No one cares. Cassie gets to be Cassie.

  The taxi comes to a halt just outside the festival gates. Anna checks her hair very briefly in the rear-view mirror, fans away the flush on her neck. It’s after 12.30 now. The touts are all gone. A few taxi drivers wander about in front of the entrance hoping to pick up some business from any early leavers either too drunk to work their Uber software or too impatient to wait. A lone copper chats with two security guys in hi-vis vests. Everyone looks cold and washed out and eager for the night to end.

  Thanking the driver (always so bloody polite) she gets out of the cab, leaving the back door open until she’s had a moment to check herself once more in the car side mirror. She’s wiping a little stray glitter from her cheek when something or someone thickens the air behind her. A man? The next Ollie perhaps. A pulse begins in her left temple but she doesn’t turn her head because it pays to be cool. Men expect it, the way she looks. She’s moving to close the car door when an arm reaches out and a hand clutches the doorframe. Her eyes flit to the hand of a small-boned woman. The arm thin and wiry-looking, even dressed in a cheap leather jacket. Around the wrist is an entrance band from the festival. In her peripheral vision she notes the driver check the rear-view mirror. A wobbly, accented voice says, ‘Please! I need taxi.’

  Anna’s head spins. She draws herself up to full height, turns in what she hopes is a regal manner. Behind her stands a petite brunette in heels, shifting her weight from side to side. East European, Anna thinks, and very drunk or maybe on something. Not my circus, not my monkeys. Leaving the cab door open, Anna steps aside to let the woman get by, but instead of getting in, the woman sinks her face into her hands and clutching the imitation leather bag around her shoulder, wails, ‘I have no money, please. No credit card, nothing. Someone steal.’ The woman is sobbing and thrusting her open bag in Anna’s face now in a way that’s quite frightening. The way her date with Ollie ended, Anna really doesn’t need this.

  ‘I can’t help you!’

  She’s grabbing Anna’s arm now. ‘Please, I’m scared.’ Anna feels herself give just a little.

  The woman seems frail and vulnerable. Someone’s taken advantage of the state she’s in. Maybe . . . And she would have found her a tenner if at that moment the woman’s fingernails hadn’t embedded in Anna’s skin like tiny knives. In an instant, she feels herself harden and grow brittle. No one made this woman take whatever high she’s taken. This is not on Anna. How bloody dare this total stranger impose herself.

  ‘I just broke up with my boyfriend!’ Anna hears herself say. Somewhere inside she’s laughing at herself. I sound like a love-sick eighteen-year-old! She pushes the woman’s hand away, but instead of letting go altogether, the woman transfers her attentions to the fabric at the shoulder of Anna’s jumpsuit, taking hold of it so tightly that Anna is afraid to move lest it tear. All her previous sympathy has completely drained away now, leaving only outrage at the intrusion. She lifts a hand and slaps the woman’s arm hard enough to leave a red welt. Shocked, the woman lets go of Anna’s shoulder but instead of fleeing or even retaliating, she stands fixed to the spot, bewildered, not knowing what to do next.

  ‘You hurt me,’ the woman says finally.

  ‘What?! You assaulted me. I’m sorry but your bag isn’t my problem. You need to tell the police.’ This makes Anna feel better, much less like a bitch.

  But the woman doesn’t appear at all grateful for the change in Anna’s tone and instead of moving away, she shakes her head, her lips trembling as if she’s about to burst into tears.

  ‘Police won’t believe.’

  This really is too much. A long whine. Slamming the door of the cab, Anna signals the driver to be on his way. He’s watched all of this in the rear-view mirror. Now he hesitates for an instant, then shrugging and shaking his head, pulls back ou
t into the road.

  The last Anna sees of the woman, she appears to have slumped to the ground. The policeman has gone now and the security guard is very deliberately looking the other way. A tall man in a hoodie, who looks as out of as the woman, watches as she tries to pull herself to her feet.

  That’s not going to end well, thinks Anna.

  16

  Cassie

  Afternoon, Friday 30 September, Isle of Portland

  We decided to make Friday afternoon down time and after lunch the four of us went our separate ways. Bo took the car to his date, Anna was at the cottage prepping, she said, for a presentation to a client on Tuesday, and Dex, who had really only pretended to work since marrying Gav, had gone back to bed. As for me, I struggled to settle into anything productive or even relaxing. Lovely though it was, something about Fossil Cottage, with its thick walls and sombre quiet, reminded me of a tomb.

  Consumed by a need to get away and clear my head, I shoulder my rucksack and head down the muddy path to Fortuneswell and The Mermaid in search of Will. The pub sits on the corner of the high street where it joins the main road heading up to the top of the cliffs. Like most of Fortuneswell, it’s unreconstructed and old-fashioned, with sticky swirly patterned carpets and dark wood fittings, a world away from the carefully constructed retro ambience of so much of London these days. There’s Will, pulling a pint for an old man with a seagoing face. He clocks me, nods and passes the pint to the old man.

  ‘Bit short,’ the old man says, piling a heap of coppers on the counter. Will tells him not to worry, then turning to me with a broad smile on his handsome face, says, ‘Hi there. How was the view?’

  I take a seat at the bar and at Will’s recommendation order a bottle of The Mysterious Mer-Chicken.

  ‘It’s a saison, brewed in Blandford, not far from here,’ he says.